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Gerald Ford: truly a uniter, not a divider

If you go around saying you’re “a uniter, not a divider,” chances are you’re a divider, not a uniter.

Not so for the late President Gerald Ford.

In much of the coverage of Ford’s death, colleagues from both sides of the aisle talk about his role as national healer following Watergate and the fact that he was well-liked by both Democrats and Republicans during his long career in the House. When he said he wanted America to win, he meant it.

I love this Ford quote (getting the wording as close as I can remember it):

“They say hard work brings good luck. I worked like hell.”

My other favorite quote from our 38th president, from the time when he assumed the vice-presidency (after Spiro Agnew resigned due to allegations of tax evasion):

“I’m a Ford, not a Lincoln.”

And this quote from when Ford took the Oath of Office following Richard Nixon’s resignation:

“I am indebted to no man and only to one woman, my dear wife.”

One of the commentators said that the early ’70s was a different political time and that Gerald Ford helped set the conciliary tone back then. In a political system such as ours, you can’t win a bare margin of the vote, barely 50 percent (or in President George W. Bush’s case, not even that much) and then ignore, thumb your nose, demean or otherwise marginalize the remaining half of the country.

Even Sen. Ted Kennedy was effusive in his praise of President Ford. Kennedy recalled that his brother, JFK, and Ford were fast friends when both were in Congress (JFK in the Senate) due to Ford’s football glory at the University of Michigan. And while, at the time of Ford’s pardon of President Nixon, the current Sen. Kennedy didn’t agree with the decision, over the years he came to see the wisdom in Ford’s move, going so far as to have a hand in honoring the Republican with a Profiles in Courage award. (Thanks, NPR, for all this info.)

As a football player, Ford more than anybody probably knew that winning elections is sometimes all about how the ball bounces. Without pardoning Nixon, he might’ve sailed to re-election in 1976, just as Jimmy Carter would’ve been re-elected in 1980, had the American hostages in Iran been released or freed before Election Day. And would we have seen a second George W. Bush term without the War on Terror (or an opponent as out of his element as John Kerry)?

I haven’t heard a lot of talk about the early ’70s marking the end of the Vietnam War and of the military draft. There was more to the era than Nixon and Watergate, and if there ever was a need for a true “uniter, not a divider,” that was such a time.

The same is true today. Look at all these factors: the so-called (and by so-called, I mean 10 percent real, 90 percent propagandized bullshit) War on Terror, capital W, capital T, nation-building without end in Iraq, an Israeli-Palestinian conflict almost wholly neglected, growing gap between rich and poor (with erosion of the middle class), worsening health-care (meaning insurance) crisis, wholly ignored global warming catastrophe, increasing dependence on fossil fuels, denial of equal rights to gays and lesbians, a culture of corporate greed extending past malfeasance, and so on.

I’m not saying that a president only from one party or another will be able to begin national healing and take the country in the right direction both here and abroad. I’ll take a man or woman from either (or God forbid, a third) party who will inspire and, yes, unite, not divide.

All I’m saying is that there are a whole lot more similiarities between now and the time during which Ford took office (excepting that Nixon — with Henry Kissinger’s help — was a foreign-policy genius … and Bush is, well, Bush).